An illusory subject preference in Algonquian agreement

Abstract

The inflection of Algonquian transitive verbs includes an agreement suffix known as the central ending (Goddard 1969). The patterning of this suffix can ordinarily be described without reference to syntactic roles: the central ending indexes either (i) both arguments simultaneously or (ii) the argument with more richly specified phi-features. In certain contexts, however, the central ending instead appears to show a preference for indexing the subject, even when the subject’s features are clearly less specified than those of the object (Xu 2016: 54–57, Bhatia et al. 2018). This exceptional subject preference is surprising to observe in an agreement slot that is otherwise conditioned purely by feature hierarchies rather than syntactic roles, and it presents challenges for the overall analysis of Algonquian agreement. In this squib I argue that the exceptional subject preference is only apparent. Rather than a preference to index the subject, there is a more general preference to maximize the informational value of the agreement morphology by not redundantly repeating exactly the same information in two agreement slots. In certain contexts, this pressure has driven the central ending to index the subject even though the subject’s features are less specified than those of the object, simply because the object’s features have already been fully identified in a separate agreement slot. This process, which can be formalized as an impoverishment rule, creates the illusion of a preference to index the subject, but in fact the only preference is to make the agreement morphology as informative as possible. The lesson that emerges is that the possibility of describing a morphological pattern in syntactic terms does not guarantee that the correct explanation for the pattern actually lies in the syntax. Morphological factors can conspire to create patterns that deceptively appear to have a syntactic source. The squib proceeds as follows. Section 2 introduces the exceptional subject preference. Section 3 considers and rejects a syntactic account. Section 4 proposes a morphological account in which subjecthood plays no role. Finally, section 5